[Technology Report] Embedded System Design Looks Strong In All Corners For 2009
When it comes to embedded system design, the choices keep multiplying. Form factors never go away—they just continue to morph. Take Acces I/O Product’s USB-based modules (Fig. 1). These boards have a PC/104 form factor but no ISA or PCI bus. They work with any USB host, from a PC to a single-chip micro. You can wire up a stack or spread them around like a hydra as multiple boards with a...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Fast Isn’t Fast Enough In The T&M Universe
The test-and-measurement segment of the electronics industry is a curious animal, forced to be a leader and a follower at the same time. T&M providers must carefully follow trends in the market, delivering the tools designers require to ensure their designs comply with communications protocols. But that means staying ahead of the curve, supplying designers with equipment that has enough bandwidth and memory to get the job done in...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Exciting New Directions In Power Brighten Economic Gloom
It never ceases to amaze how much mindbogglingly fascinating technology is associated with the supposedly staid discipline of power technology. Take gamma correction in TV receivers. The gist of it is simple. Once you replace your compact fluorescent LCD screen backlighting with an array of LEDs, you can dynamically control the brightness across the screen to match the relative brightness of blocks of the video signal in real time. The effect improves the...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Analog Chip Makers Venture Into New Technological Waters
Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and other technologies may represent a paradigm shift as analog chip makers struggle with immediate and long-term challenges (see “Analog Survival Means Learning To Be Adaptable,” p. 17). This is the way Todd Borkowski, marketing manager of the Micromachined Products Division at Analog Devices, characterizes the thinking behind the development of ADI’s MEMS technology, relative to the limitations of electret condenser...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Components And Their Packages Evolve To Resolve Market Demands
Whether it’s a connector, cable, display, indicator, or any type of sensor, it will undergo an evolutionary change in form and functions. They’re becoming smaller and smarter, lower in cost, and more flexible to use, but they all have one common denominator: They require a suitable package that can deliver all of these features to satisfy end-user and OEM demands. For connectors and cables, continual improvements on established interfaces aside,...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] It’s Business As Less-Than-Usual For Wireless
Lots of companies are looking for the killer app in the wireless world. But wireless is the killer app. Despite the bleak economy, wireless developments and adoptions will flow— though at a slower pace. CELL PHONES • The core trend of completing the installation of 3G cell-phone capability remains on target. Companies like AT&T and Verizon already have most of their main sites 3G-capable, deployed with HSPA technology....
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Broadband Broadens To Satiate Consumer Demand
Wireless gets all the attention these days. Its continued development and widespread adoption across all areas make it the darling of the semiconductor and cell-phone industries. While that relationship will continue to flourish, some serious work is being done on the wired side. Most of the latest highspeed data efforts involve wired technologies like optical and new Ethernet variations. In fact, broadband and Ethernet are at the forefront of...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Design And Verification Move Up In Abstraction
Pressure is mounting on verification engineers to reduce the time and cost of ensuring that system designs are thoroughly debugged. The economy heading into 2009 demands that designers begin the verification process as early and at as high an abstraction level as possible, even in the behavioral stages. Doing so helps eliminate functional errors. Gaining efficiency in the verification process has a number of salutatory effects. For one, it means delivering...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] EDA Retools To Exploit Multicore Architectures
With no end in sight to the spiraling transistor counts in today’s bleeding-edge systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), the runtimes for EDA tools are rising in corresponding fashion. If filling all of those gates isn’t enough to worry about, now designers have the additional drag on their productivity of waiting… and waiting… for place-and-route or physical verification runs to end. In the meantime, they hope and pray that after days, or even weeks, a given run won’t...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Connector And Cable Makers Can’t Stand Pat
The connector market is huge, diversified, and convergent, from consumer to commercial through medical to military and aerospace, all with equally daunting and diverse opportunities for innovation and creativity. In fact, “all markets are ripe for innovation in interconnects,” says Rob Rix, vice president of Industry Marketing, Communication & Industrial Solutions at Tyco Electronics. In the anatomy of all things electronic, connectors and cables are the...
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Mat Dirjish
[Technology Report] Power-Sipping Micros, Multicore Monsters Dot The Landscape
Anyone waiting for a consolidation to occur in the micro or DSP arenas should settle in for the long haul. The choices just keep growing, even as vendors attempt to use software and peripheral consistency to simplify what developers have to deal with. Yet the array of options isn’t the sole purveyor of multiplicity. Multicore also falls into this category, and now it’s moving into embedded. Low-count, high-performance multicore chips will continue to dominate the...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] There’s No Stopping Digital’s Progress
One thing is for sure. Advances in the digital realm continue at a breakneck pace, even if various limits force the move to multicore and lower-power devices. ASICs and high-performance processors are pushing 45 nm, but not without challenges. Adoption of the latest and greatest is slowing due to technical challenges and the economy. Likewise, existing technologies are meeting the needs of most designers who are not pushing the proverbial envelope. Look...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Analog Survival Means Learning To Be Adaptable
A dapt! That’s always a good notion in a period of change. It becomes a matter of customer relations, long-term vision, product pull from deep in the future, and the ability to draw a roadmap from here to there. For example, traditional suppliers of silicon-based analog products are adapting their product lines to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Analog Devices and Wolfson Microelectronics surprised me last fall with briefing requests related to...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] The Comm Market May Be Down, But It’s Not Out
First the bad news. 2009 is stacking up to be a poor year for the electronics industry, including the high-flying communications sector with its past exceptional wireless growth rates. Projections for all communications segments are down. But the good news is that most businesses aren’t going away. While growth will be less to none this year, it probably will not be as bad as the dot-com disaster in 2000-2002. So think positively and press forward with...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Forecasting Industry Growth For 2009 And Beyond
Welcome to our 2009 forecast issue. In deciding what to write for this issue, one presentation from last year stuck in my mind. During November’s electronica show, National Semiconductor chairman and CEO Brian Halla outlined the products and industries that would be the next big drivers of the electronics industry. Halla used a very interesting graph of the cyclical growth of the electronics industry. Most engineers are familiar with a damped sine wave....
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Joseph Desposito
[Technology Report] Tough Serial, Wireless Requirements Propel Test & Measurement Innovation
Today’s state-of-the-art serial communication links typically operate from 6 to 8 Gbits/s, with the highest data rates running to more than 10 Gbits/s in specialized backplanes. Such high-speed serial technologies bring an increasing level of complexity to the game for designers. With this greater complexity comes a growing need for analysis and compliance applications with built-in domain expertise and easily reproducible test-equipment configurations. ...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Parallel Processing Zooms While Debugging Zags
Parallel processing is everywhere, with almost as many software choices as hardware. Symmetrical-multiprocessing (SMP) designs and clustering dominate large-core, multicore solutions on PCs and servers. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have their own architecture optimized for data flow, while specialized multicore solutions abound. In many cases, the hardware vendor may supply a de facto standard, but even this can change over time. ...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Ultra-Portables Bank On Power-Frugal Components
Anew breed of components is emerging, significantly reducing power and in turn paving the way for ultra-portable—and ultra-low-power—systems. Needless to say, manufacturers will now look at other products in this vein. Power consumption is the most important design challenge for ultra-portable devices that operate from a limited energy source, such as a lithium-ion battery, according to Ken Marasco, system applications manager at Analog Devices. This...
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Sam Davis
[Technology Report] The Economy Tanks While FPGAs Grow
FPGA hardware technology will continue to improve across the spectrum this year. Actel’s Igloo Nano FPGAs are available for under $0.50 (Fig. 1), while Achronix will be shipping 1.5-GHz Speedster (Fig. 2) parts. Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and Xilinx will be pushing the limits of their product lines as well, but it is the year of...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] ASICs Stumble At 45 nm
The steady progress of ASIC design in embracing each new semiconductor process node has stalled at 45 nm, and it may take some time to jump through that hoop. Growing design challenges, rising costs, and shrinking benefits face users of the latest processes, with relief far from sight. So instead of designs moving in a wave toward new generations, the adoption curve is flattening out. Therefore, many process nodes remain viable even though they’re many generations...
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Richard Quinnell
[Technology Report] Ever-Shrinking ICs Turn To Exotic Packaging Methods
The dizzying pace of semiconductor IC miniaturization and performance advances keeps changing the face of IC packaging. Demands for lower-cost packaging that must also deal with greater amounts of heat emanating from these tinier packages have designers scrambling. Many packaging efforts are being devoted to materials innovations that optimize the existing manufacturing infrastructure. Variations of the popular package-on-package (PoP) and package-in-package (PiP) approaches...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Touch Sensors Press For Low Costs, Streamlined Design
In terms of overall integration, touch sensors and their related components are probably the most seamless technologies. From automated teller machines (ATMs), cell phones, and video games to test-and-measurement and medical equipment, touch interfaces can be found nearly everywhere. And unless they’re confusing or inoperable, they’re taken for granted by most users. In a brief period, touchscreens have evolved beyond the simple, single-button entry format. State-of-the-art...
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Mat Dirjish
[Technology Report] Up-And-Comers Threaten Flash Memory’s Supremacy
As the decade closes, the major battleground in memory technology lies squarely with nonvolatile (NV) devices. Even as flash—the king of NV memory—continues adapting to increase its utility, challengers based on magnetic and anti-fuse technologies are rising to wrest away a growing number of applications. At the same time, market forces are eroding the profitability needed to fund further flash technology developments. Despite its limitations, flash is the dominant ...
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Richard Quinnell
[Technology Report] Challenges Lurk For 22-nm Physical Implementation
As difficult as the challenges of verification are at the 32- and 22-nm nodes, those of manufacturing a device with reasonable yields and reliability are perhaps even greater. Doing so will require an extremely sophisticated physical implementation environment that accounts for physical effects in the design loop as well as manufacturing variability in its optimization routines. The manufacturing challenges also open up new EDA opportunities after tapeout and signoff, such as...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Speedy Serial Interfaces Charge Into The Next Generation
High-speed serial interfaces such as PCI Express and USB are becoming more familiar to developers and users, even as the standards push into their third and fourth generations. New releases usually highlight higher throughput, but the more subtle features often have the real impact in new designs. These newer standards address issues such as security, quality of service (QoS), and distance. Backward-compatibility tends to be the norm as well, and this trickles through related...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Massive Storage Arrives Just In Time For HD Applications
Storage providers are whetting designers’ appetites with terabytes at the top end and silicon for a range of embedded applications. Newer interfaces like Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) are now the norm as Inetgrated Drive Electronics (IDE) quickly fade, at least on the hard-drive side. And, a move to smaller form factors is without question. The 3.5-in. drives still dominate capacity equation, but 2.5-in. is the new target. Server redundant arrays of disks (RAIDs)...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Power Sources Generate Green By Going Greener
From ever-shrinking dc-dc converters to brute-force industrial and benchtop power supplies, one of the top priorities for power designers has always been efficiency—eliminating the power losses when converting power from one form or level to another. For instance, not so long ago, we saw the shift from linear regulators and 50/60-Hz power transformers to high-frequency switching power supplies. Today, the buzzword for efficiency is “green.” Emerging power sources flying under...
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Mat Dirjish
[Technology Report] Embedded Hardware Percolates On All Fronts
Getting to market quickly is a major determinant in the build-versus-buy choice. Thanks to a host of new processor options, the choice is clear: system creation through the use of boards and modules. Most existing modules and board standards such as EPIC, PC/104, VME, and CompactPCI continue to shine. The installed base is the main reason, but they also meet the needs of designers for a range of applications. Their lower cost will remain an advantage for a number of...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] LCDs, LEDs, OLEDs, And EPDs Light The Way
Display technologies continue to march forward, with LCDs, LED displays, organic LEDs (OLEDs), and electrophoretic displays (EPDs) leading the charge. LEDs and OLEDs may even overtake LCDs for some applications, while EPDs carve out a niche in electronic-ink displays for portable and flexible electronic products. Nonetheless, LCD applications are flourishing and becoming more diverse, requiring equally diverse design challenges to meet different performance...
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Roger Allan
[Pease Porridge] What’s All This Raging Canal Stuff, Anyhow?
There’s an old folk song that goes, “Well, she’s gone, gone, gone, and she’s gone, gone, gone. I lost my true love on the Raging Canal.” Back in the 1840s, a bunch of local Connecticut businessmen decided, after seeing how well the 1825 Erie Canal was going, that a canal could enable commerce between Hartford and the upper Connecticut River. Steamboats could get around the rapids at Enfield, using this canal, which would also provide water for...
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Bob Pease
